Assignment: Paper 208 : Comparative Literature & Translation Studies

 NAME : Mahida Bhumika Prakashbhai

M A Sem - 4

ROLL NUMBER : 4

ENROLLMENT NUMBER :3069206420200021

SUBJECT :Paper 208 :Comparative Literature & Translation Studies 

“Translation and Literary History: An 

Indian View”

Introduction:

Ganesh Devy:

Ganesh N. Devy is an Indian literary critic and former professor. He is known for the People's Linguistic Survey of India and the Adivasi Academy created by him. He is credited to start the Bhasha research and Publication Centre. He writes in three languages—Marathi, Gujarati and English. 

What is Translation Studies ? 

Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an interdiscipline,translation studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support translation. Translation enables effective communication between people around the world. It is a courier for the transmission of knowledge, a protector of cultural heritage, and essential to the development of a global economy. 

Translation its Role and Scope in India:

 

The role of translation can hardly be overemphasized in a multilingual country like India with 22 languages recognised in the eighth schedule of the constitution, 15 different scripts, hundreds of mother-tongues and thousands of dialects. One can very well say that India’s is a translating consciousness and the very circumstances of their real existence and the conditions of their every day communication have turned Indians bilingual if not multilingual. One can even add without exaggeration that India would not have been a nation without translation and we keep translating almost unconsciously from our mother-tongues when we converse with people who use a language different from ours. 

Translations of literary works as well as knowledge-texts: discourses on medicine, astronomy,metallurgy, travel, ship-building, architecture, philosophy, religion and poetics from Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Persian and Arabic had kept our cultural scene vibrant and enriched our awareness of the world for long. Most of our ancient writers were multilingual: Kalidasa’s Shakuntala has Sanskrit and Prakrit; poets like Vidyapati, Kabir, Meerabai, Guru Nanak, Namdev and others each composed their songs and poems in more than one language.

Translation has helped knit India together as a nation throughout her history. It brought, and still brings languages closer to one another and introduces to one another diverse modes of imagination and perception and various regional cultures thus linking lands and communities together. Ideas and concepts like ‘Indian literature’,  ‘Indian culture’,  ‘Indian philosophy’ and ‘Indian knowledge systems’ would have been impossible in the absence of translations with their natural integrationist mission.Translation also plays a role in extending the scope of language and reframing the boundaries of the sayable. New terms and coinages necessitated by translation create new vocabulary and contribute to greater expressibility. One thus learns not only to understand foreign literature and philosophy through the mother-tongue, but also to speak about modern knowledge, from quantum physics to nano-technology and computer-science to molecular biology in the regional language.Translation strengthens democracy by establishing equality among different languages and questioning the hegemony of some over the others as it proves that all ideas and experiences can be expressed in all languages and they are exchangeable in spite of their uniqueness. It also enables the weaker sections of the society to be heard as they can speak in their own dialects or languages and then get translated into other languages that are more widely spoken and understood. Thus translation contributes to the empowerment of the marginalised or deprivileged sections like the poor, women, dalits, tribals, minorities, the disabled and others.

Translation also helps fight colonial prejudices. For example, by translating our works of literature and knowledge into English, we prove to the world that the coloniser is in no way superior to us as we too have a long history of great writing and research. The British had translated from India only what suited their taste; but now the empire is writing back , telling them what they have to read to understand our peoples and cultures, thus changing their old ‘orientalist’ conceptions of India.No doubt translation also promotes the growth of indigenous literature and knowledge by bringing into our languages the great wealth of other literatures and cultures. By translating masterpieces from other Indian languages as also from foreign ones, we enrich our own literatures. Thus we also raise our writing standards: this happens especially when we translate great masters of world literature like Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Vyasa, Valmiki, Kalidasa and Bhasa or more contemporary writers from Tolstoy,Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Lorca, Eliot and Thomas Mann to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Orhan Pamuk, J. M. Coetzee, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and others. These exchanges also create new movements and trends.Literary translation:  There are many institutions here and abroad dedicated to literary translation.  Translating foreign literature into Indian languages, Indian literature into foreign languages and Indian literature in one language into other Indian languages are all gainful activities in every sense. Sahitya Akademi, Ntional Book Trust, regional literary associations and publishing houses both in English and the languages are on the lookout for capable translators. There is a new interest in Indian literature abroad as the young non-resident Indians who do not know their languages are eager to read their literatures in translation in the languages they know and also as foreign readers are eager to know what is happening in Indian literature. The recent spate of literary festivals all over the world from Berlin to Jaipur  and book fairs like the ones held annually at Frankfurt, Paris, London, Bologna, Abu Dhabi  etc  have contributed to this rising fascination.

“Translation and literary history: An Indian view”

In this Article by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi , they said that ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile,’ says J. Hillis Miller1. The statement obviously alludes to the Christian myth of the Fall, exile and wandering. In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin; and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a post-Babel crisisiii. Given this metaphysical precondition of Western aesthetics, it is not surprising that literary translations are not accorded the same status as original works. Western literary criticism provides for the guilt of translations for coming into being after the original; the temporal sequentiality is held as a proof of diminution of 

literary authenticity of translations. The strong sense of individuality given to Western individuals through systematic philosophy and the logic of social history makes them view translation as an intrusion of ‘the other’iv. This intrusion is desirable to the extent that it helps define one’s own identity, but not beyond that point. It is of course natural for the monolingual European cultures to be acutely conscious of the act of translation. The philosophy of individualism and the metaphysics of guilt, however,render European literary historiography incapable of grasping the origins of literary traditions. For the structural linguistic concept they have said that, it considers language as a system of signs, arbitrarily developed, that tries to cover the entire range of significance available to the culture of that language. The signs do not mean anything by or in themselves; they acquire significance by virtue of their relation to the entire system to which they belong. This theory naturally looks askance at translation which is an attempt to rescue/ abstract significance from one system of signs and to wed it with another such system. But language is an open system. It keeps admitting new signs as well as new significance in its fold. It is also open in the socio-linguistic sense that it allows an individual speaker or writer to use as much of it as he can or likes to do. If this is the case, then how ‘open’ is a particular system of verbal signs when a bilingual user, such as a translator, rends it open? Assuming that for an individual language resides within his consciousness, we can ask whether the two systems within his consciousness can be shown as materially different and whether they retain their individual identities within the sphere of his 

consciousness. Or do such systems become a single open and extended system? If translation is defined as some kind of communication of significance, and if we accept the structuralist principle that communication becomes possible because of the nature of signs and their entire system, it follows that translation is a merger of sign systems. Such a merger is possible because systems of signs are open and vulnerable. The translating consciousness exploits the potential openness of language systems; and as it shifts significance from a given verbal form to a corresponding but different verbal form it also brings closer the materially different sign 

systems. If we take a lead from phenomenology and conceptualize a whole community of ‘translating consciousness’ it should be possible to develop a theory of interlingual synonymy as well as a more perceptive literary historiography. 

The concept of a ‘translating consciousness and communities of people possessing it are no mere notions. In most Third World countries, where a dominating colonial language has acquired a privileged place, such communities do exist. In India several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these languages formed a continuous spectrum of signs and significance. The use of two or more different languages in translation activity cannot be understood properly through studies of foreign-language acquisition. Such theories work round the premise that there inevitably is a chronological gap and an order or a priority of scale in language- learning situations. The field is stratified in terms of value-based indicators L1 and L2, though in reality language-learning activity may seem very natural in a country like India. In Chomsky’s linguistics the concept of semantic universals plays an important role. However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism can be stretched. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs. Owing to the structuralist unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of any non systemic or extra- systemic core of significance, the concept of synonymy in the West has remained inadequate 

to explain translation activity. And in the absence of a linguistic theory based on a multilingual perspective or on translation practice, the translation thought in the West overstates the validity of the concept of synonymy.

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: ‘Translation is an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another; clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language – a general linguistic theory’. The privileged discourse of general linguistics today is closely interlinked with developments in anthropology, particularly after Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss. During the nineteenth century, Europe had distributed various fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy: comparative studies for Europe, Orientalism for the Orient, and anthropology for the rest of the world. In its various phases of development modern Western linguistics has connections with all these. After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism. For a long time afterwards linguistics followed the path of comparative philology. And after Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, linguistics started treating language with an anthropological curiosity. When linguistics branched off to its monolingual structuralist path, comparative literature still persisted in its faith in the translatability of literary texts. Comparative literature implies that between two related languages there are areas of significance that are shared, just as there may be areas of significance that can never be shared. Translation can be seen as an attempt to bring a given language system in its entirety as close as possible to the areas of significance that it shares with another given language or languages. All translations operate within this shared area of significance. Such a notion may help us distinguish synonymy within one language and the shared significance between two related languages. 

The translation problem is not just a linguistic problem. It is an aesthetic and ideological problem with an important bearing on the question of literary history. Literary translation is not just a replication of a text in another verbal system of signs. It is a replication of an ordered sub-system of signs within a given language in another corresponding ordered sub-system of signs within a related language. Translation is not a transposition of significance or signs. After the act of translation is over, the original work still remains in its original position. Translation is rather an attempted revitalization of the original in another verbal order and temporal space. Like literary texts that continue to belong to their original periods and styles and also exist through successive chronological periods, translation at once approximates the original and transcends it. 

The problems in translation study are, therefore, very much like those in literary history. They are the problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality. And as in translation study so in literary history, the problem of origin has not been tackled satisfactorily. The point that needs to be made is that probably the question of origins of literary traditions will have to be viewed differently by literary communities with ‘translating consciousness’. The fact that Indian literary communities do possess this translating consciousness can be brought home effectively by reminding ourselves that the very 

foundation of modern Indian literatures was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra 

Chatterjee. 

Conclusion:

Thus , Indian metaphysics believes in an unhindered migration of the soul from one body to another. Repeated birth is the very substance of all animated creations. When the soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance.Indian philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics. The soul, or significance, is not subject to the laws of temporality; and therefore significance, even literary significance, is ahistorical in Indian view. Elements of plot, stories, characters, can be used again and again by new generations of writers because Indian literary theory does not lay undue emphasis on originality. If originality were made a criterion of literary excellence, a majority of Indian classics would fail the test. The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to revitalize the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of translation.

Works Cited:

Satchidanandan, K. “Translation in India.” K Satchidanandan, DIGITAL LEARNING NETWORK, 1 Mar. 2011, digital learning.eletsonline.com/2011/03/translation-its-role-and-scope-in-india. 

“"translation and Literary History: An Indian View” by Ganesh Devyi.” Madhu Singh, Madhu Singh, 4 May 2013, udrc.lkouniv.ac.in/Content/DepartmentContent/SM_c30be09c-d6c7-4cd2-a95c-a81119f654eb_6.pdf. 

Words 

 2454

Characters

13,693